1 Jan 07
Living with Guns
Many years ago, while attending The US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft Leavenworth, KS, I submitted a paper entitled, "Living With Guns".
In it, I described my sometimes exasperating experiences as an infantry second lieutenant, platoon commander in Vietnam in 1968. I observed that, during that War, although we all had been theoretically trained to operate small arms, nobody had ever taught us how to live with them!
I submitted that individual soldiers need experiences that prepare them, not only to operate, but to actually live with, loaded guns during prolonged periods of intermittent (and sometimes continuous) fighting. One may argue that such training is dangerous, but without it I contended, our soldiers will continue to accidentally shoot themselves and each other with distressing frequency the moment they enter an area of active fighting.
In Country, I had personally observed many cases of careless gun handling, several of which resulted in NDs, and, as is the case currently in Iraq, there was no shortage of incidents where an ND caused a serious injury or death to one of our own people. However, despite the fact that such catastrophes were scandalously common, they usually elicited little more than a sarcastic chuckle (or a yawn) from battalion-level brass. They seemed to write off such episodes as "inevitable". They would remark, "These people have been trained in safe gun-handling. It shouldn't happen".
But it kept happening, and it struck me that sterile, abstract training in "safe gun-handling" did not suffice to prevent it.
In stateside training, individual soldiers were rarely provided with experiences that prepared them for when they would have loaded and ready-to-fire rifles and pistols with them constantly. It was not enough, I contended, to merely train people how to operate small arms, then hysterically snatch the guns away and lock them up in a vault the other ninety-nine percent of the time.
In training, for example, we never actually carried loaded weapons. We
handled them, but they were always empty except on those rare occasions where we actually fired live ammunition on a range. But, even on the range, circumstances were stilted, artificial, and largely theoretical.
However, the moment I arrived in Vietnam, we not only carried loaded firearms, but we slept with them, ate with them, went to the head with them, flew on aircraft with them, etc. Your small arms were your constant companions, and they were always loaded and ready to fire. All that we had to learn on the fly! None of it was ever even mentioned during our stateside "training."
We learned the hard way that is does not suffice merely to train people how to operate guns. We have to make them into professional gunmen, not just gun operators, but gunmen! Anyway, if you're familiar with USMC and US Army bureaucracy, you can imagine how far my ideas got. Even today, this issuehas still not been addressed in any meaningful way. Soldiers today are instructed to be (on rare occasions) warriors, and naive sheep the rest of the time.
In short, incompetent small-arms training was, and still is, "
condition-based." It is predicated on the false notion that unloaded guns are safe, and loaded guns are dangerous. Within this mendacious system of thinking, “safe"
guns are routinely handled carelessly (no matter what you try to say to the contrary), and "dangerous" guns (on those rare occasions when they are actually handled at all), are apprehensively treated as if they were coated with poison. The rest of the time, we carry sterile guns and pretend to be armed.
Conversely, competent small-arms training is "system-based.†There is only one system for handling guns, as all guns are considered dangerous, all the time. All guns are handled the same way, regardless of their ostensible condition. In other words, a gun's suppositional "condition" has no bearing on the way it is handled. We have no safe guns! We carry loaded guns on our person at every opportunity, taking full advantage of every chance to experience "being armed" (not just pretending).
This fearless and audacious system of gun-handling, combined with good judgement, and common sense will enable you to live with loaded guns daily and never experience even your first accident. Professional gunmen are distinguished from pretenders by four main points.
(1) We're always armed. Yes, we really live it.
(1) We don't have accidents with guns.
(2) We don't hesitate
(3) We don't miss.
Unfortunately, Western Civilization, even its armies, is rapidly deteriorating from a proud foundation of logic, reason and courage to an unenlightened state of nescient fear and ignorant mysticism, truly a recipe for chaos.
Details may differ slightly, but the philosophy is indistinguishable from the Dark Ages.
As HL Mencken put it, "I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. Of course, this makes me forever ineligible for public office."
... or, it would seem, promotion!
/John Farnam
